As documented here, $DAYJOB is detracting from my blogging a bit. I pour most of my vim and vigor into the now required Daily Status Report. I arbitrarily added a couple of sections to my DSR; Observations, Mood, and Thought for the Day. These sections are used for unsolicited editorial comments, at least some of which have been well received by my Overlords.

Lest this turn into one of those posts lamenting my lack of posting, I really have something to say this time.

I’ve also switched from TicklerWiki to DokuWiki for the production of the DSR. TicklerWiki is based on Tiddly Wiki. Any of the TW family has the wiki entirely contained within a single html file, which is makes portablilty trivial. Just copy the file to a thumb drive, transport it, and use it anyplace you have a web browser. No web server, just file -> open, and you’re wikified. And it was a great ride, until a few weeks ago when the TW file got unaccountably and unexpectedly truncated. While TW’s auto-backup feature mitigated the impact of this, I decided to implement a new platform.

Enter DokuWiki. Requiring a web server and PHP, DW is only slightly more involved in its setup. However, DW stores all the wiki pages as plain text. No Postgres, mySQL, or any other database backend needed. Plain text. An old Unix graybeard’s dream come true. The entire wiki content can still be transferred to a thumb drive for portability. So, I stood up a webserver on localhost, fired up DW, and I was off and running.

As I started doing the DSRs on DokuWiki, I realized that DW had many more uses. Now, my entire day’s activities live in DW. Examples:

• Someone emails me new IP addresses for remote systems that need to be reconfigured next week. Create a DW entry with the new information pasted from the email, set a task to do the reconfig on the proper date. Come go time, call up the task, cut and paste the new network info into a terminal window, and rock on.
• I have tons of downloaded PDFs,many with cryptic filenames. Create a documentation namespace, upload them to DW, with appropriate annotations, and read/retrieve as required.
• Draft project plans/implementation How-Tos, etc in DW, export them to html, and distribute as needed.
• The many DW plugins available for formatting code, bash shell sessions, etc, make it almost fun to do documentation.

My enthusiasm for DokuWiki precipitated a skunkworks project to use DW to update our aging knowledge base system. And skunkworks projects are the most fun of all.

-k-